Sunday, April 5, 2015

This blog post discusses my thoughts about technology that I use on daily basis, what I love about it, what I don't love, and how I feel about technology’s effect on our cognizance. I have given a few examples to support my claims

Technology today has advanced so much that we depend on it and it will not be unfair to say that we cannot survive without it. There have been emergencies declared in places where technology was out temporarily in the past. We use technology everyday while at home or driving on the road, this has become so transparent in many places that we use technology not knowing we are using it. For Instance, it was only very recently when I found out the traffic lights were controlled by a technology that is sensitive to the traffic activity and they were not using the timers anymore.

What I really love about technology that I use on daily basis is; first, it has made my life a whole lot easier, I can do things a lot faster than I used to do without technology, and it has helped with my productivity. The famous "do less achieve more" comes to my mind. For example, my earlier travels to New York City was very time and effort consuming and at the end of the day made me real tired leaving me with only so little sense of accomplishment. I had to keep a lot of maps for riding Subways and Buses, keep track of schedules and if something doesn't go the happy path, it would take a whole lot of extra time to correct what I missed. But now I just keep my smartphone in my pocket, I just tell Siri what I would like to do. She would suggest me places to choose from and once I have picked a place she would also tell me which way to walk towards to get what bus or train, where to make connections, and what time I should expect myself to arrive by.

Another Example of technological things I enjoy is my DVR at home, I don’t have to worry about missing my favorite TV show episodes anymore, I can watch it at my schedule. It also allows me to pause when I have to answer the door or take a bathroom break. I can also rewind to watch my favorite scenes again, and it also allows me to watch wherever I am over internet; not just at home.

Now coming to what I don't love so much about technology. There are many ways the technology does not make me happy. The biggest one is, when it stops working as it does a lot of times; it brings your world to a grinding halt. Take that New York City mass transit example, when you find out that the cellular data service is not available in the area you are in; you are on your own with no plan B. Another thing I hate about technology is that it is expensive. You have more bills to pay when depending on technology than when you live without it.

I don’t think technology has made us any smarter, it has actually the reverse effect in many cases. It is cutting our connection to the knowledge of how things used to be done without it and has convinced us up to some extent that we are not going to need to learn about the ways our ancestors lived their lives.

For example, according to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) census survey of 2007, only 1% of the Americans reported farming as their occupation. Which concludes that 1% of the population is growing food for the whole population. How is it possible? Technology. Agriculture workers are using airplanes to spray fertilizers, or pesticides over the crop; they are using big harvesting machines that does the wonders most of us are completely oblivious to. But this also concludes that most of 99% of the us may not know how the food is grown and will not be able to if required for our own survival.

Technology is keeping people away from reading books and do research to invoke the healthy brain activity. People rely too much on technology to just grab the exact piece of information with little to no effort of searching through the books and magazines. This has gone so far out of the hands that the word Google is added to Oxford dictionary as a verb which means to search using Google.com.

Conclusion

Technology comes with pros and cons, on one side it makes our life easy but on the other side it comes with requiring you to plan the usage of it. It does amazing things for us and takes care of a lot of things for us. While using it for our own good, we should never stop the process of the human learning process that is being passed down to descendants for ages. This helps us determine how things have evolved and also help us invent new ideas of how to make technology even better.